It's an interesting irony that, when the Christmas season comes around, many mystery lovers like to relax by reading books with a Christmas setting. Christmas - time of joy and cheer and present, vs the murder and mayhem of a mystery novel. Well, typically we read the cozies - not the police procedurals, so Christmas cheer isn't entirely destroyed!
Well, it's the new year but I decided I'd read An Alpine Christmas anyway - as I'm staying at my parent's house and Mary Daheim books are prevalent.
And I found it, if not educational, giving me cause to think about getting an education in certain areas that were brought up:
I read this paragraph, and then I had to check to see when this book was published:
Regarding a 10-foot plastic Santa Clause statue to tower over Old Mill Park:
"It will be an apropriate seasonal reminder, and a compromise in response to criticism of the manger scene that has stood in Old Mill Park every Christmas since 1946. Let it not be said that the City of Alpine is insensitive to those who do not share basic Christian beliefs."
The book was published in 1993.
And I thought that was interesting. So the "attack on Christianity" in the US has been going on since at least 1993 - that's 15 years...
(Don't get me wrong, I'm an atheist. But I'm tolerant. If people want to believe in God, I don't mind. I don't even mind if Muslims want to believe in God, if only they wouldn't insist that their women are dirt and have to wear burkhas and cover every inch of their body, and if it's even suspected that they've been seen by a male outside their immediate family, they must immediately be killed to preserve the "honor" of the family).
In other words...the sight of a woman wearing a burkha offends me much more than driving past a creche on some public building's front step. Yet it's apparently the creche's that have to go, because that's bad, but we must accept women wearing burkha's, because that's being tolerant of Muslim beliefs!
Then there was this paragraph:
"...And the Hopis have been plucked right down in the middle of the Navajos. No wonder they hate each other. The federal government's relocation in the Seventies still causes hard feelings."
Now, I was born in 1961, and so was a teenager in the 70s, and actually don't know much about Native American history after the end of the Civil War, when their subjugation and removal onto worthless land called reservations was complete, but I would've thought that by the 1970s the guv'mint couldn't go around relocating American citizens anymore. (Although if they live on reservations, are they actually considered citizens of the US as well?) As you can see my knowledge of Native Americans today is sketchy.
But it's typical. I wonder if all the problems of the modern day can be ascribed to the fact that oblivious white folk have rearranged tribal and ethnic boundaries with no knowledge or caring of the ethnic strifes that that would cause - from the partitioning of Europe after WWI and WWII, settting Isreal in the middle of Palestine - yep, that was a great plan and there was no way at all of knowing what would ensue from that! - and in the US, reservations in which migratory Native Americans were forced to become farmers or starve, and hereditary enemies were slapped down on the same land....
Well, too complex of a subject to discuss on a mystery book blog. But...that's the educative power of the mystery novel. I'll have to look up this stuff - educate myself.
After I finish reading the book.
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